HMRC's IT employees could face the chop as 137 offices are to shut in bid to save £100m

HMRC strives to have 'fewer staff in the future' but PCS says the plans were 'devastating' and 'posed a significant threat to the operating of HMRC'

IT employees could be some of the thousands of staff in danger of being axed by HMRC as it plans to cut £100m in costs by 2025 with a 10-year "modernisation" programme.

HMRC said in a statement that it would close 137 local offices by 2027 and replace them with 13 new regional tax centres which are to open over the next five years.

HMRC said it expects the "majority of staff" to be able to move from their current offices to a regional centre, and said it would phase the moves over ten years in order to minimise redundancies.

But it admitted that it would be striving "to have fewer staff in the future as it streamlines how it works and uses the best of modern technology to reduce costs".

The Public and Commercial Services Union said that the plans were "devastating" and "posed a significant threat to the operating of HMRC".

General secretary of PCS said the need for parliamentary scrutiny of the plans was "undeniable and urgent".

A HMRC spokesperson told Computing that it was not yet known how many employees and exactly which employees would be affected, but emphasised that the aim of the programme was not to make redundancies but to move away from a Victorian way of working.

Meanwhile, a PCS spokesperson told Computing that the whole department would be affected but questioned whether many IT workers are employed by HMRC or are from a private contractor.

"I haven't seen any plans regarding the contractors," said the spokesperson.

In its statement, HMRC said that the programme was at the ‘halfway point', and included investment in new online services, data analytics, new compliance techniques, skills and ways of working.

HMRC's 58,000 full-time employees are currently spread across 170 offices around the UK - with some offices hiring fewer than 10 people and others hiring about 6,000. HMRC claims that many of these offices are a "legacy of the 1960s and 1970s".

"HMRC has too many expensive, isolated and outdated offices," said HMRC's chief executive Lin Homer.

"This makes it difficult for us to collaborate, modernise our ways of working, and make the changes we need to transform our service to customers and clamp down further on the minority who try to cheat the system," she said.

Homer claimed that the new regional centres will modernise the way the organisation would work, as the centres would be equipped with digital infrastructure and training facilities that it needed to improve services. HMRC wants to move out of many of its offices that are based in central London, and Homer believes that the new centres will be "cost-effective buildings in areas with lower rents".

The organisation will have four specialist sites for work that cannot be done elsewhere - including where HMRC needs to work with its IT suppliers or other government agencies.

These will be in Telford, Worthing, Dover and at the Scottish Crime Campus in Gartcosh.

Computing has asked several further questions to HMRC in regards to IT and is awaiting a response.